{‘I spoke total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, saying total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
